The teenage Moroccan dancer at the centre of the sex scandal surrounding Silvio Berlusconi has appeared in an Italian commercial promoting a book by a former MEP.

Karima El Mahroug, 18, whose stage name is Ruby the Heart Stealer, has cashed in on her notoriety by advertising Alfonso Luigi Marra's 'The Female Labyrinth'.

In the advert, a man dressed as the Phantom of the Opera suddenly appears and rips off her red dress, leaving her standing in a black bra and knickers.

In a rambling message she then describes the book as a treatise on the Italian economy, unemployment and the evils of the banking system, saying Italian society had been "stripped bare" by the government.

In a recent television interview, Miss El Mahroug claimed that she was raped at the age of nine by two uncles and ran away from her immigrant parents' home in Sicily in her early teens.

She said she invented a "parallel world" to try to forget the trauma of her experiences.

She ended up working in bars and nightclubs in Milan performing belly dances and erotic shows.

The teenager, then 17, was introduced to Silvio Berlusconi through one of the prime minister's closest associates, Emilio Fede, a veteran television presenter who reportedly spotted her at a beauty contest.

The prime minister asked her to a private dinner at his mansion at Arcore, outside Milan, early last year.

She initially said the evening degenerated into a sex party involving a line-up of glamorous starlets, but later changed her story, claiming it was a quiet soiree at which nothing improper took place.

The teenager denies she ever had sexual relations with Mr Berlusconi but said he gave her 7,000 euros as a gift because he felt sorry for her.

In May she was arrested on suspicion of stealing cash and jewellery from a female acquaintance in Milan.

But she was released from custody after police received a phone call, at around midnight on the night of May 27-28, from the prime minister himself, who claimed that she was the grand-daughter of the then Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak.

She was released into the care of Nicole Minetti, an Anglo-Italian former model and dental hygienist who was elected a regional councilor for Mr Berlusconi's People of Freedom party and is now under investigation for procuring prostitutes for the prime minister.